DVD notes: Fantastic ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’

Mr. and Mrs. Fox (George Clooney, Meryl Streep) have what sounds like a real husband-and-wife conversation in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” The movie, a box-office flop, came out on DVD last week.

OK, maybe the headline is a bit of an overstatement. But if “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which came out on DVD last week, and which we rented Saturday night, isn’t fantastic, it’s close. And it makes me wish I had seen it on the big screen.

I have lots of company, though. Few people saw Wes Anderson’s quirky tale when it hit theaters Thanksgiving weekend. It had the misfortune to turn up in the middle of “Twilight” and “Blind Side” mania, and its old-school, stop-motion animation made it a tough sell. It certainly wasn’t a children’s movie or one with cutting-edge CGI or one with real people and cute animated critters like last season’s holiday classic, “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.” And it didn’t even have 3-D. Heck, it was barely 2-D.

So even having George Clooney and Meryl Streep as the principle voices couldn’t prevent it from flopping at the box office.

I had my doubts, too, before finally plucking the DVD off the video-store shelf Saturday. For one thing, although “Fox” director Anderson has been praised for his work on “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” my only experience with him had been the weird “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004), which Roger Ebert had described as “a comedy without laughs.” True enough. I laughed maybe three times the whole movie, yet its strange, surreal visuals and bone-dry humor made me glad I saw it.

Based on the Roald Dahl book, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is also a challenge for the viewer, especially for those expecting something along the lines of “Up” or “The Princess and the Frog.” And not just because there’s stop-motion animation instead of wondrous, computer-generated visuals.

For one thing, the story line is not some feelgood Disney tale that leaves you all warm-hearted and glowing afterwards. George Clooney’s title character is a retired chicken thief turned newspaper columnist (the two professions aren’t that dissimilar, really) whose headstrong, risk-taking behavior endangers his family’s safety, not to mention the entire animal community.

Yes, Boggus, Bunce and Bean, the three farmers and victims of Mr. Fox’s recidivist larceny, are portrayed as horrible people. But wouldn’t you swear vengeance upon a thieving varmint, too?

So there are no heroes and no moral. “What was that about?,” my wife asked. “I’m not sure,” I replied. “Maybe it’s about being true to your nature?”

What it’s about, then, is what we’d expect from a nonanimated movie  an interesting tale told simply, accented with wit and memorable visuals. I’ve never seen this sort of detail in stop-motion animation. The facial fur of Mr. and Mrs. Fox seems to bristle and glisten, even on our low-def TV. At times, when the Foxes are tunneling to safety when their home is under attack from the three farmers, the movie seems like a giant version of the old video game Dig Dug.

And the screenplay, from Anderson and Noah Baumbach (“Greenberg,” “The Squid and the Whale”), has ear-grabbing lines such as this one from Mr. Fox that skewers the Big Statements made by other animated flicks  “Redemption? Sure. But in the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.”

Then there’s this decription of the animals’ favorite game, Whackbat. The coach explains the rules to a newbie:

Basically, there’s three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pine cone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pine cone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.

Complicated? Sure. But if you tried to explain the rules of baseball to an alien, they might sound something like that.

The film was distributed by 20th Century Fox, which figures. Fox, the studio, did its best to promote “Fox,” the movie, to the point of sending out foxtail neckties. Now that I’ve seen “Fox,” I understand why that particular promo item was chosen. As for understanding the movie itself, I’m still working on that. But I’m enjoying the process.